Modeling and experimental verification of a novel vacuum dust collector for cleaning photovoltaic panels

The multi-stage expansion chamber (MEC) nozzle can remove the dust particles from photovoltaic (PV) panels, but the nozzle shows a lack of dust collection. To address this issue, a novel vacuum dust collector is proposed in this study. The coupled computational fluid dynamics and discrete element method simulation model simulates the dust particle-airflow motions to optimize the structure of the collector and its working angle. High-speed photography tests are conducted to verify the optimum working angle and evaluate the function of the dust collector. The binarized images of the PV panel show that the area of the residual dust pixels in the image after cleaning the entire PV panel surface is only 0.013% of that before cleaning, which proves that the vacuum dust collector can significantly improve the dust removal performance of the MEC nozzle. Furthermore, it provides a theoretical foundation for developing non-contact dust removal machinery for PV panels.(c) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.